[stripes1776]

The most fundamental ideas -- such as privacy, modesty, personal space (your bathroom e.g.) -- are Judaic. They go back to the cleanliness and godliness of the temple priests, the Levites and Zadokites (Sadducees), whose ablutions and customs of cleanliness were taken up by the Essenes and transmitted by them to the proto-Christians. Greco-Roman ideas like, say, mass public latrines and baths with full nudity and sexual activity in the alcoves (exedrae) have been repudiated in our culture, and the recrudescence of "Greek" sexual mores is almost exclusively homosexual and decayed. Trying to

That characterization of ancient Greek and Roman culture is extremely distorted and frankly wrong. Those culture were highly moral, developing moral philosophy and intellectual disciplines that make ancient Jewish culture look quite primitive. Christianity never took root among Semitic cultures, whether Jewish or Arabic.

Without the Hellenistic inheritance, there is no West.

[lentulusgracchus]

That characterization of ancient Greek and Roman culture is extremely distorted and frankly wrong.

It is "extremely distorted" only in this, that I pointed to a feature of classical life that is conspicuously missing from Western culture today; and howbeit that that arrangement was not the rule among the people who practiced classical civilization, nevertheless it is diagnostic, an Occam's Razor if you will, for separating and distinguishing the classical attitudes toward the body and bodily functions from their Judaic counterparts. We inherited the Judaic attitudes and customs.

This statement is abundantly supported by the archaeological record and is not "wrong".

[lentulusgracchus]

Christianity never took root among Semitic cultures, whether Jewish or Arabic.

That defi will come as a severe shock to Christian Galilaeans and to any number of Maronite and Nestorian Christians. Believing it would make it nearly impossible to understand how Christians in India came to practice their liturgy in Syriac. My sister got married in this language 25 years ago, in a church Christianized 17 centuries previously by St. Thomas of India, who followed the Roman trade routes to take up a mission in the Greek trading entrepots of the Malabar Coast.